How to Create a Jira Dashboard (2 Methods)

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Published in Software Development on 13/07/2024.

It can be tough to know what’s going on when you just open a Jira project full of issues. That’s why a lot of the work product managers, team leads, and other leaders do centers around making the hard work of their software development team more visible to other stakeholders. One of the ways they do this? Jira dashboards.

There are two main ways you can create a Jira dashboard; one relies on built-in Jira features and the other needs a little help from Unito.

First method: Use Jira’s built-in dashboards

Creating a built-in Jira dashboard is pretty simple; there’s a Dashboards tab specifically for doing that!

Click on the Dashboards tab and you’ll see this menu.

Just hit Create dashboard. Then give your dashboard a name and a description before hitting Save.

Congratulations, you’ve just created your first Jira dashboard! But you’re not done quite yet. Now you have to choose the gadgets you want to add to your dashboard.

Gadgets represent charts, visualizations, and other aspects of your dashboard. By adding them to your dashboard, you can customize the kind of data you want to pull out of your projects to share with your team and other stakeholders.

This dashboard, for instance, has the Average Age Chart, Pie Chart, and Issues in progress gadgets.

Building your first dashboard in Jira is that simple! And when you add a gadget to it, you can set it up to refresh automatically after a certain delay, meaning your data is always up to date!

Limitations of this method

So while built-in dashboards are a great Jira feature, they’re not always the best way to share important Jira data. Here’s why.

• You can only see them in Jira: You can only share Jira dashboards with your organization, groups in Jira, or project members. Need to work with people who use other tools? Too bad! You’ll have to find some way to export your Jira issues to another tool.
• They only take in Jira data: Sure, this isn’t a limitation if you only want your dashboard to represent data from Jira. But if you’re working on cross-functional projects with other teams, you might want to show this data as a piece of a greater whole, which means you’ll need data from multiple tools in a single dashboard.
• They might not have the visualizations you need: Jira dashboards do have about 30 gadgets with all sorts of visualizations, but you can bet it’ll probably be missing the one you need for that one dashboard your boss asked for.

Jira’s built-in dashboards definitely get points for how quick they are to set up, but they’re still not the best solution for every purpose. So what’s the other way?

Second method: Create custom Jira dashboards with Unito

Unito is a no-code workflow management solution with some of the deepest two-way integrations for the most popular tools on the market, including Jira, Google Sheets, Asana, Excel, GitHub, and more. With a Unito flow, you can automatically sync Jira issues with custom dashboards built into tools like Google Sheets, Excel, Airtable, Notion, and more.

The best part? Whenever that Jira data changes, it’ll be kept updated in both tools. Here’s why Unito is the best way to build dashboards for Jira issues:

• They’re more shareable: Tools like Airtable and Notion let you customize who has access to your dashboards, even if they’re not working in these tools. That means you can create read-only views of your dashboards that anyone can see, even if they don’t have an account for the tool you choose.
• They can take in all sorts of data: You’re not stuck with Jira data. If you’re working on a bigger project that needs to pull in data from multiple tools, you just need a few Unito flows to keep it all in one place.
• You get the visualizations you need: Instead of being limited to Jira’s gadgets, you can use a dedicated database tool like Airtable and Notion to build the exact dashboard you need and trust Unito to fill it with your data.

Ready to start? Here’s how you can build the Unito flows you need to make your Jira dashboards work, using Google Sheets as an example.

And that’s it! Now launch your flow and watch as your new Jira dashboard is automatically populated with data.

Watch a demo video sync Jira projects to Microsoft Excel

Here’s how you can achieve a similar workflow that sends Jira project information into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet:

FAQ: Jira dashboards

What is a Jira dashboard?

A Jira dashboard is a custom view that lets you represent data from multiple projects in one place. By adding what Jira calls “gadgets,” you can customize the charts, graphs, and lists on your dashboard. Some examples of these Jira dasboard gadgets include:

• Issues in active sprints
• Issue status across projects
• Average time spent on work by project
• Issues in each release
• Issue statistics
• Pie charts

It might seem a bit overwhelming at first, but you can easily iterate on your dashboard to keep just the gadgets you need.

What’s the difference between a Jira dashboard and a Jira board?

A Jira dashboard allows project managers to build a custom view full of data pulled from multiple projects. It might show issues in a list or similar views, but the primary goal is to get a broad overview of Jira issues across multiple projects.

Compare this to a Jira board, which is a Kanban board that lists the issues for a single project.

A project manager might use this Kanban board to review the issues in that one project, get a quick sense of what still needs to get done, and so on.

How do you set up a Jira dashboard?

You can build dashboards in just a few steps:

• Click on the Dashboards tab from the bar at the top of your screen.
• Hit Create dashboard.
• Pick the gadgets you want to add to your dashboard, like issue lists and pie charts.

And if you want to feed your dashboard with data from multiple Jira projects—or other tools—you can use Unito’s integration for Jira to build a simple two-way sync.